I posted to a light-hearted blog called Fucked Translation over on Blogger from 2007 to 2016, when I was often in Barcelona. Its original subtitle was “What happens when Spanish institutions and businesses give translation contracts to relatives or to some guy in a bar who once went to London and only charges 0.05€/word.” I never actually did much Spanish-English translation (most of my work is from Dutch, French and German) but I was intrigued and amused by the hubristic Spanish belief, then common, that nepotism and quality went hand in hand, and by the nemeses that inevitably followed.
In all the years (how many?) this blog has existed only one repentant offender has ever got in touch, so it’s time for sterner measures. Here’s a positive way of coping with those gifts of faux-Anglo clothing that you can’t wear out of the front door because the slogan is so shamefully illiterate: Who said…
For El País user blogs’ sole function is to drum up page views for its paid-for content, and not all of them are to be taken entirely seriously. This was rather like listening to a person with dementia who may have something interesting to say but has lost control of words and syntax: This afternoon…
Javier Rioyo Jambrina and Rosa León will apparently struggle to make themselves understood to their target audience in their new jobs. But then their boss, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, has spent the last 7 years demonstrating that you don’t need English (or even particularly elegant Spanish) to triumph in the international arena. It surely can’t…
Here. Forro might have been a better choice. Unfortunately, to be able to demand a sea-going 747 on the basis of trade descriptions legislation I think you might have to demonstrate some intent to deceive.
Somewhere over the rainbow (p18 to be exact), there’s a country where the health system allows doctors to write prescriptions for alcoholic beverages, and where Torres can openly corrupt them with gifts of the same. Either that or Origin Spain is two redundancies in one: a web magazine, written in Spanglish.
Via Carlos Ferrero Martín and @ucedaman, another great menu, featuring ears to the iron, sepia to the iron with ali smelt, almejas to the sailor, tape of lomo… “Ali smelt” is original and perhaps a calculated insult to one or all Shias, but “a la” as “to the” has tested the imagination, though not always…
An advert for eating young live crab? Of course not: it’s a mistranslated wine label, discovered by the excellent Warren Edwardes. I’m guessing that this is the Casa de la Viña 2010 Chardonnay, whose translated web puff is better, though by no means faultless.
Carlos Ferrero Martín points me to this story about the terrible potential consequences of not matching what is meant and what is understood when drunk-signing with armed gang members. La Razón, never to be outdone, converts two victims into four. Fucked translation: deux points.
The Dutch economy looks pretty good from just about anywhere at the moment, but I’m pretty sure government departments there still all employ an English native speaker to draft and translate messages aimed at foreigners. The Spanish economy shows few signs of emerging from its hole, but even though central government seems equivocal about reducing…